Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Worst SEO ever

This is another year-in-review post that is long overdue, partly because I'm a horrible procrastinator, and partly because on the exact day when my blog turned one year old, the world came down here in my little corner of Western Europe, and since I was (and still am) much too cowardly to even begin to write anything about what happened that day, I opted not to write anything at all.

A couple of weeks later my own personal world came crashing down, and that shit is somehow even more painful to write about here, and on top of that it is not just my story, but the story of us, and I'm not one to go and share other people's story on the internet, even if in this case it is exactly 50% mine.

What I did want to share is that I learned a lot in my year of blogging. I've had a couple of blogs before, but never out in the open like this, and the things I've learned have been surprising and wonderful and scary and weird, which is exactly what the internet can be expected to deliver on any given day.

I've learned, for instance, that the internet tends to respond in the exact opposite way of any boyfriend I ever had:

Really, internet?

This makes perfect sense to me, because I'm still vaguely convinced I willed the internet into existence when I was twelve by praying for a world in which we could relinquish our awkward bodies and meet in a space that consisted solely of minds. Of course I had more of a talking cloud society in mind, but I guess some other people were praying for weird porn, so this is what we got.

I've learned that the internet is full of amazing bloggers, from the darkly poetic (the clueless pixie), to the hilarious (The PinkNoam), the kind (Crankoutloud) and the brave (Rubber Shoes in Hell). I've learned that there are always people who understand exactly how you feel, and you only have to find them. I've learned that the world is filled to the brim with friends you haven't met yet.

Mostly, though, I've learned that having the word 'sucks' in your blog title is, without a doubt, the worst SEO move you could ever make. I think I deserve some kind of award for this, especially since I put a genuine amount of research and effort into deciding what the concept of my blog would be, only to come up with the absolute worst idea in the history of the internet. It means that if my blog were ever to be found by anyone, it would exclusively be by people who thought that all the things I write about because I love them, well, suck. I've learned this from my Google search results:

NO THEY DON'T!!!

Basically, I have created the perfect system to only attract people who'd hate me, along with the occasional vampire or demigod:

I feel you.

At least I can take comfort in the fact that despite our differences, we'll always be united in our shared disdain for raisins.